Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence, born August 15, 1990, in Louisville, Kentucky, is one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed actresses of her generation, the youngest-ever Academy Award winner for Best Actress in film history, a performer who exploded onto the international stage in her early twenties with a series of roles combining physical authority, emotional rawness, and disarming comedic naturalism that made her the defining young female star of the early 2010s. Growing up in Louisville as the youngest child of a contractor father and camp director mother, she showed from early childhood a restless energy and gift for performance that led to community theater. She persuaded her parents to let her audition in New York at fourteen, booking commercial and television work. Her breakthrough came with Winter's Bone (2010), Debra Granik's unflinching portrait of rural Ozark poverty, in which her performance as the fiercely determined Ree Dolly earned her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress at age twenty. Two years later she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook (2012), David O. Russell's romantic dramedy in which she played the volatile, grieving Tiffany Maxwell with ferocious comedic and emotional precision, becoming the second-youngest Best Actress winner in history. She received a third nomination for American Hustle (2013) and a fourth for Joy (2015). Parallel to her award-season success, she became a global cultural phenomenon through the role of Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise (2012-2015), one of the most successful film series in history. All four of her Oscar nominations came before she turned twenty-six, a record of early achievement matched by virtually no other performer.